It’s certainly true that patients should follow proper procedures to fully comply with Colorado’s medical marijuana law, but that isn’t always easy. At a certain point, officials need to use common sense and consider whether the activity they’re prosecuting is truly criminal.

Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that marijuana is indeed medically useful. A study published last month in the journal Neurology found that marijuana relieved a type of debilitating nerve pain that commonly afflicts patients with HIV — a type of pain for which there are no FDA-approved treatments. Someday soon, society will look back at prosecutions of patients like Jack Branson for using medical marijuana and see them as every bit as incomprehensible as the burning of witches in the 1600s.

It’s certainly true that patients should follow proper procedures to fully comply with Colorado’s medical marijuana law, but that isn’t always easy. At a certain point, officials need to use common sense and consider whether the activity they’re prosecuting is truly criminal.

Vincent Carroll is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. He has been writing commentary on politics and public policy in Colorado since 1982 and was originally with the Rocky Mountain News, where he was also editor of the editorial pages until that newspaper gave up the ghost in 2009.

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